The Un-Fuckening

Stop talking about AI like this

“If your company is not running on AI agents, you have a BIG problem”

“AI will put you all on welfare”

“The Fuckening is coming”

Stop it with the rageposting. Stop it with the performative fearmongering. Stop behaving like little brats getting a high from scaring each other in the locker room, desperate to prove they belong.

There is no shortage of voices predicting some version of social collapse. Their vision of the future somehow always involves most people getting left behind.

Yet most of us still choose to embrace this life and the people in it nonetheless. To be in it together. To take one another by the hand, rather than turning into shallow engagement machines endlessly predicting the end of everything.

And so, yes, mission accomplished. You are scaring people. According to various polls, many now worry about a future with AI more than they look forward to one.

Sometimes scary is good. Every now and then we need it in order to get shocked into action. But fear without a meaningful path towards resolution is just cruelty.

“Go watch my videos and pay for my online course where you learn to build agents OR FALL BEHIND” does not cut it. Most people cannot just change their lives on command. Many are holding down jobs, caring for children and elderly parents. Others simply cannot move that fast because they are who they are, shaped by routines they have formed over decades.

“Expect it to get incredibly, intergenerationally rough out there. Batten down the hatches, and do what you can for yourself and those around you.”

- Andrew Yang

I believe in the AI exponential and am as AGI-pilled as it gets. I believe that the upcoming years will bring about tremendous changes for society, including significant job disruptions. But no, I don’t think that therefore everyone is fucked and we are all better off optimising our individual positions in whatever new world order is awaiting us. I certainly reject the notion of doing whatever it is I can to escape the permanent underclass. To adopt the mindset of “don’t mind the others, just get ahead while you still can” is to give up on what made this life meaningful in the first place.

The acceleration is real. I am not arguing otherwise. What I am arguing is this: the way we are narrating this moment is doing serious societal harm. And the way many leaders are showing up inside it is outright unworthy. Years from now, I suspect we’ll look back and realise how much harm the narrative of this moment did and what a wasted opportunity it was to articulate a future people might actually want to inhabit.

“Get ready to lose your job” is not a public service announcement. You aren’t doing anyone a favour by warning them early. Instead, you are belittling the lives of countless people. Statements like these are a cruel flex. Repeated often enough, we are not just describing a dystopian future, but also creating one.

People have started calling that future The Fuckening. I'm here to tell you it need not be the one we're headed for. But un-fucking it requires something more fundamental than better messaging - it requires changing the worldview beneath it.

Most headlines about AI focus on hundreds of billions in capex, more data centres, more compute, and more power. At the same time, people are being told that AI may take all their jobs, that they are already behind, and that if they have not automated their lives yet, they are failing. We are asking human beings to work harder and adapt faster, while also telling them they will never be able to outwork what is coming. Most of it squeezed into the size of a tweet, a clickbaity news headline, a Linkedin post, or an AI-generated infographic. Always easily digestible. Always highly sensational.

Much of the data about where AI is headed and what it may mean for specific industries is not so much false as it is devoid of any vision of the future that makes us feel excited about what is to come. It is spiritually and morally empty.

The people driving the narrative seem to have decided that the only audience worth addressing is the investment class and the Silicon Valley elite. As everything gets sensationalised, the void of meaning for the rest of society becomes shockingly large.

I am not advocating for ignoring facts or glossing over hard realities. I am advocating for acknowledging the position of privilege and power from which the technology elites and corporate leadership are planning for this vast transition. I advocate for a narrative that does not discard people like a horse trying to rid itself of an annoying fly.

I am also arguing that communication is much more than the mere arrangement of words and facts. Before it is a tool for external legibility, it is a tool for internal clarity. At its best, it forces us to confront our worldview by asking the only questions that really matter:

What are we building?

Why are we building it?

Who is it for?

In a world where the narrative of strongmanship and the law of the jungle are rubbing off on all of us, we need to be very intentional in asking what our worldview actually is. Otherwise, despite all the brilliant minds working on scaling models and pushing the exponential, we are really just working backwards now.

Defining our worldview

To make sense of this moment in time, let’s go back in history. For a long time, in the geocentric worldview, the Earth was thought to sit motionless at the centre of the universe, with the Sun, the Moon, planets, and stars all orbiting around it. Formalised by Ptolemy around 150 CE, it matched everyday intuition (we don’t feel the Earth moving) and had the Church’s backing, making it the dominant model for over a millennium.

The shift to the heliocentric worldview unfolded gradually over roughly 150 years, from the mid-sixteenth to the late seventeenth century, and played a central role in the Enlightenment. Copernicus first proposed a Sun-centred system in 1543. Galileo later used the telescope to observe moons orbiting Jupiter and the phases of Venus, both of which challenged a purely geocentric view. Kepler then showed that planets move around the Sun in ellipses rather than perfect circles, and in 1687 Newton provided the gravitational mechanics that explained why it all worked.

Other than realising how limited our understanding of the universe was, there is a uniquely interesting phenomenon here. The geocentric worldview placed humans at the centre of the universe, believing that man was the peak of creation - but then proceeded to enslave, rape and kill much of mankind. Human centrality did not produce dignity.

In fact, what produced dignity was the opposite move: stepping back from the human claim to cosmic importance and asking instead what we owe each other simply because we are. That is the philosophical shift the Enlightenment achieved. Championed by philosophers like Immanuel Kant, it spread the belief that humans matter not because God said so or because the stars orbit us as some function of our rare uniqueness, it simply posited that humans matter, full stop.

And so, two things happened at the same time: Individual humanity became more important, even as we became less significant in our understanding of the wider universe. Rather than a paradox, this is the very logic of human dignity. The less our worth depends on being cosmically special, the more durable it becomes. It is tethered in itself, rather than to some external superiority.

The technocentric worldview

I would argue that we are currently in the midst of a third shift: the technocentric worldview. In this view, increasing capability begins to function as a moral argument of its own. If something can be built, scaled or accelerated, that fact alone starts to justify it, no matter the consequences.

Faustian in its nature, it sees it as the imperative of humanity to explore all that can be known, pursuing all technological possibilities open to mankind. We have taken this worldview so far that some of the smartest and most capable humans are now all-in on developing technology they believe has a small to not-so-small chance of killing us all. Rather than slowing down, they perceive a game-theoretical conundrum: there is no mechanism that ensures coordinated slowdown of AI research and allows safety research to catch up, because we cannot verify that this slowdown actually happens. And so they continue pushing toward acceleration, racing to reach a winning point ahead of their competitors, thereby being able to shape the new world order according to their preferences.

In the technocentric worldview, things will just play out as part of some inevitable cosmic game. Humans must simply deal with it - if we’re lucky enough to come out of this alive.

This is part of the tragedy of the technocentric worldview: it does not require bad people to produce bad outcomes. It only requires the logic of acceleration to become self-reinforcing, which it already has. Individual moral clarity, which I believe some of the people building AI do possess, cannot on its own stop a potentially destructive systemic dynamic. Even those with serious moral frameworks are not absolved from the fact that they are accelerating the world towards an increasingly deterministic vision of the future.

Then there is the other side of the tragedy, embodied by fearmongering tweets and the people in AI who, for lack of a better word, are simply shrouded in shadiness. They say one fundamental, grand, moral thing, only to toss it out the window a little while later. They make eerie comments about human suffering and pain, without even the semblance of an understanding of what this actually means. It is remarkable how quickly a civilisation can start speaking as if ordinary human life were a rounding error.

Gone are the times of Kant, where morality exists not because it has utility value in the moment, but because it simply exists, eternally and unconditionally. A world shaped in the image of these leaders is one that moves us forward technologically, while detaching us from our humanity at the same time.

Now some of you might argue that I am a Luddite, a conservative critic of progress and science. Far from it. I know that the arc of human progress is deterministically pushing ever forward. I get the game-theoretical conundrum. I know that this means we keep arriving at the bigger and bigger realisation that humans are not that special after all. That in the arch of evolution we may just go extinct, no different from the dinosaurs all those years ago. After all, we are but one species on a small planet in a vast universe. The more we learn, the more we understand our own insignificance in the wider scheme of things. That much I know.

But I fundamentally reject that this diminishes the value of individual lives as well as the carelessness and cruelty with which the AI narrative is currently being diffused in society. AI labs, founders, journalists and corporate leaders all play a role in this because the words we use to talk about humans and AI form our reality.

A humancentric way forward

The technocentric worldview tells us that human value is measured in productivity and in the ability to keep pace with machines. At a moment when intelligence itself is being profoundly unsettled, even if the real-world consequences may take time to unfold, that is an especially dangerous premise.

I believe that the more we embrace our insignificance in the cosmic order, the more firmly we should embrace our worth. The ground becomes more solid, not less, once we stop demanding that the universe organise itself around our uniqueness. This is what the Enlightenment understood. It is also what we are now in danger of forgetting.

Next to the technocentric worldview that is currently sweeping through our world, I would therefore place a humancentric worldview. They should exist side by side, as two sides of the same coin. Technological capability must be matched by a deeper commitment to human dignity.

The humancentric worldview rejects the premise that human beings should be defined by their AI productivity. Not because AI adoption does not matter, it does. In fact, it is hugely important. We need it to keep the fabric of the economy and society intact, to make any transition into a new social reality manageable, and because it offers humanity yet another tool with which to create unprecedented opportunity. But your worth is not something you earn by working with or outcompeting an algorithm. Your worth exists because you are alive. Because you feel things. Because you are capable of joy, grief, boredom, desire, wonder, pain and love. Because conscious life matters in and of itself.

That is the whole point. And it is almost entirely absent from the current discourse on AI progress.

The less special we become, the more seriously we must take one another. Our dignity does not require centrality. Human worth resides in the experience of being alive, not in any claim to cosmic importance or cognitive supremacy. The less human value depends on human specialness, the more durable it becomes. And we need that durability now, because the argument for specialness is about to become much harder to make.

Throughout history, each time our cosmic importance shrank, it did not have to diminish our moral worth. If anything, it increased the burden on us to create meaning, defend dignity, and build institutions that protect the individual from power and exploitation.

The danger of the current moment is that technological acceleration is outrunning our moral ambition. I do not want to read about another Fuckening. I want to hear leaders rise to the challenge of this moment and articulate a vision of the future that makes us want more of it, not less. Otherwise, we are becoming more capable without knowing what the hell that capability is for.

Technological advancement is not the same as human progress.

Let’s change that.